Case study – Choosing an LMS, ‘the selection challenge’. The ANCA Group, Australian Exporter of the year 2015 – Group HR Manager speaks to the challenges of selecting the right LMS for a Global engineering company, supporting their staff needs after a ‘global culture survey’ showed learning was highly desired, and the reasons for their LMS technology requirements. Challenges faced and reasons for choosing LMS365 installed into their own Microsoft Office 365 Tenant.

Vado is changing the face of learning. Our eLearning courseware is unique because:

Development happens on the job – Research shows that 70% of development happens on the job, and Vado is the only off the shelf e-learning courseware provider that helps the learner apply on the job through step by step instructions.

The combination of short videos followed by step by step instructions on how to apply on the job, helps the learner put into practice the learning they just completed.

Built to meet the way most people learn (on the job), each Vado course provides learners with a brief Introduction Video, as well as an exercise to perform on the job to practice and
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If you would like to receive a current copy of the 2016 Course Catalogue for eLearning course 350+ Vado library visit our Elearningforce ANZ web-site click on ‘Contact Us’ – add your contact details and we’ll will e-mail you with a copy.

In Higher Education as in business. The question becomes, how to utilise Business Intelligence to understand business impacts, staff skills and needs, training and capability, and how that affects your business and consumer results by location, region or country. When you consider the potential impacts, that need becomes a paramount activity to gain specific knowledge and enable delivery of the best possible outcomes for your Education Institution or Business investments.

Business Intelligence has been bandied around for years with solutions costing the proverbial ‘arm and a leg’, and have been found technically close to impossible to achieve desired outcomes, poor access to the right core data (in various sources and forms) that would allow full business interpretation to underpin clear business decisions. The exponential growth of data and sources will only make this more difficult in the future.

Why then place training at the core of business intelligence? Well people resources, are simply the largest probable investment you make in your business. It is the least controlled in terms management of actual engagement with Customers, Partners and Students, unless you are a pervasive people controller in your business, then sadly you will lack the best people. However, this is still the area that has the most immediate and direct impact on your business results.

From a technology perspective the key change to recognise here is, that, this needs to become ‘Platform Centric’ for your institution or business, no longer best served (or even viable) by disparate software applications and services, as we move into an ‘always on’, mobile connected world with ubiquitous wireless connectivity.

As a business, if you can assess training course delivery in product knowledge, soft skills, management skills, education outcomes, customer services or sales team capability. Then understand the net impact those training provision efforts have achieved by individual, team, location, geographic region or country. If you could then go on to measure the impacts by sales achieved, new business customers, services delivered, or any other business relevant measure, and could forecast future outcomes related to that effort. You will have achieved clear measurable results, or if you will, a very clear analysis and measurement of return on investment (ROI) for training or skills investments.

The question you may ask is, how does Business and Higher Education HE differ, and I propose not much, product delivery is to committed customers or students, who have a clear determinable need for the product or service with personal goals, or planned outcomes for the consumption of those services. Retention and growth of customer or student is for their full life cycle – win once, and deliver several times, building trust and loyalty. And above all, business growth plans to continue to grow facilities (physical and technology based), creating additional services, to add more capability to meet changing and growing customer or student needs.

To achieve those outcomes, it would seem the core focus should be on the technical delivery, with principle attention on the customer or student experience first, and assurance that the product of your business meets those explicit customers’ needs, and is not diverted or delayed working on internal IT impediments and tasks, just trying to get things to talk together.

In my previous article here I discussed the emergence of ‘Education as a Platform’ or perhaps a business may consider it to be ‘Training as a Platform’. The results from a Platform approach will be the similar for both in terms of increased engagement, satisfaction with solutions and services with significant growth potential in measurable outcomes from eLearning and Business Intelligence.

Discover how a fully integrated learning management system built as a component of the leading platform supplier, can meet these needs and add new potential to your business or institution. Utilise Power BI fully integrated with the LMS365 – Learning Management Systems for Office 365 and SharePoint

The past reliance on the ever expanding, Learning Management applications, seems to be reaching a natural end point as they have outgrown their usefulness. To achieve education outcomes and user engagement, these large unwieldy solutions require the primary focus to shift to one of ‘program expertise’ in order to utilise them and complete learning tasks. The result can be limiting, slow, confusing and distracting for teacher and learner alike. Further, to achieve acceptable user access to these complex systems, requires a whole series of IT support issues to be managed. IT infrastructure changes and allowances need to be made to accommodate them, mostly resulting in a compromise. Let me clarify that point, IT research over recent years has shown that ‘Best of Breed’ applications require an IT focus of +/- 80% on interfacing, data matching, support and maintenance and only 20% effort is ever focussed on the end-user satisfaction and experience.

The usual practice then of application selection is with a focus on buying a ‘best of breed applications’, but rarely on any of the issues of the integration and IT support to deliver the promised functionality of those best of breed solutions. The result is nearly always a shortfall in the primary reason for purchase, ongoing cost and complexity, and further issues emerge as new technology is required to be embraced. Historically the key driver for this best of breed approach seems vested in an ‘Institution Centric Approach’, application vendors selected have sought to win favour with those institutions, perhaps the safety of selection approach applies here – the old adage of, ‘no-one got fired for selecting IBM’. The change is coming quickly, ‘Institution Centric’ has given way to a ‘Student Centric’ model, which creates an entirely new perspective. It would seem then as a viable approach; for this type of large application solution, has surely reached the end-of-the road. Educators have been calling-out the end of the LMS for years, I think not the end, but the start, the start of a very different execution model.

The Future looks to be more focussed on Platforms rather than applications, platforms that embrace technology, with you, as either teacher or learner being embraced as a part of that platform. This transition from applications to platforms will become a time critical change if we expect better outcomes from Education technology investments. The notional view to take here is, ‘Education as a Platform’. Why, the first answer to this is one of integration. All the needed software elements for either learning, teaching or management tasks are at hand, where you expect to see them, and integrated into the overall platform. So, simply put, both the learner and the educator should themselves be seamless parts of the overall platform, transferring thoughts into pedagogy, accessing, responding and utilising the right tools at the right time to teach and learn.

So what does that make ‘Education as a Platform’? The context here, has to be that the platform itself has all the connections, course access, content and media, collaboration points, research, sharing, storage and retrieval needed to acquire, manage or deliver education. At your fingertips, tasks simplified and conducted without thought, just do. This I feel, will be a rapid change of direction, the target demographic for teaching this way have only ever utilised the best available technology, so will not be receptive or accepting (are not accepting) of old technologies and methods. Universities are the place this demographic group expect to arrive at, and have access to, the best possible education processes and capabilities. If those technologies are not evident, a University cannot expect to grow or retain student numbers. If your Engineering, Research or Medical faculty want access to teach and learn using embedded holographic technology as course content artefacts, how will you embrace that into older technology?

The key to this discussion is not one of, one LMS versus another. It is that, your future LMS or Virtual Learning Environment VLE, must be a new paradigm in technology delivery, one that is built from a totally platform centric perspective, not an LMS that will just ‘run on a platform’. The new direction will mean this new learning management solution needs to be engineered as a component part of the overall platform, and that, that platform itself needs to have the leading edge capabilities and capacities to engage, create and deliver new technologies to the teacher and learner on any device in any location.

Microsoft HoloLens at the leading edge of Education and visual reality using Holograms in medical research, teaching and learning – add this kind of amazing content to your LMS365 course content with Office 365 technology – plan for the future.